At the end of 2018, Pokemon had launched the Pokemon Card Friendly Shop Campaign (ポケモンカードフレンドリィショップキャンペーン).
In the mainline Pokémon games, Friendly shop or Poké Mart (in English) is a place where the player can buy items for their Pokémon. These shops are found in just about every town and city in the games. The concept for this campaign was similar. In Japan, Pokémon Card Friendly Shop was a store specializing in Pokémon cards, Pokémon card-related products, merchandise and limited edition products. If a purchase is made above the intended Yen limit (excluding tax), you were eligible to receive a promo card with the logo of the Pokémon Card Friendly Shop.
Friendly Shop Logo
The campaign would always begin on Friday of the week and would end when the stock was completely gone. All products related to the Pokemon card game, including expansion packs (including enhanced expansion packs, high class packs, etc.), construction decks, and peripheral goods were eligible. This included both the current and past series of expansions.
To be able to find a Friendly shop near by, you had to use the store locator map on the Pokemon Card website and filter on the Friendly shop logo to display the shops in your area.
Unfortunately, Scorbunny was the last Friendly Shop promo card as it was announced that Pokemon Card Friendly Shop will close at the end of December 2021. However, this was a great campaign while it lasted, featuring beautiful artwork and makes for a great mini-set for collectors.
This is my very first article for E4. As a promo collector, I am very interested in cards which are part of a particular campaign and are linked by that campaign even across different generations. I thought it would be a nice idea to start off featuring one such campaign. These cards have gorgeous artwork and would indeed be a fun mini-set to have. I would appreciate any and all feedback with regards to any aspect of this article. Thanks a lot.
I received a few of these. Reminds me of better times when you could walk into any store and buy what you wanted no problem Nowadays the stock situation for anywhere other than Pokémon Centers if you’re lucky feels really sad.
So glad you made this, those pikachu promos have been catching my eye the past few months! Didnt know pokemart was called friendly shop in japan, wish we had more promotions like this lol
In the Friendly Shop campaign, “Friendly Shops” are not physical shops - they are mostly toy counters of large retailer chains such as Bic Camera or Yodobashi Camera authorized by TPC to become “Friendly Shops”. For some reason, not every store from the same chain would all be Friendly Shops (for example, Bic Camera in Akihabara was not a Friendly Shop).
In most cases a new promo card would be added to this seires at around the same time when a new Xa enhancement set (SM6a, SM7a, SM8a, …) was released. In 2021 however, a lot of toy counters in retail chains had been temporarily closed during COVID lockdown, which probably explained why TPC only released 2 cards in 2021 and eventually decided to stop the series.
Not quite sure about the SM promos, but the SWSH copies were distributed to participating stores in sealed 50-(or 100?-)card decks, so if you’re really picky on card condition, you might want to bring some sleeves so that you can sleeve the cards as soon as possible, and (if you planned to get multiple copies) get the cards from different shops instead of getting all copies from the same shop, as they may share the same damage (like if an employee drop the whole deck on the ground and left corner damage on all cards).
Nowadays the stock situation for anywhere other than Pokémon Centers if you’re lucky feels really sad.